by Dietmar Wehr
As they awkwardly carried it to a section of the vehicle bay where it would not be in the way, they heard Ripley’s voice over the intercom. “Bridge to Ashiana, We’re close enough now that your shuttle can head home anytime.”
“Understood!” she replied in a loud voice. When they had set the device down, Eagleton asked. “How does it work?”
Ashiana shook her head. “There’s not enough time to explain. I’m sure your technical people will be able to figure it out, Gort. I have to go now.” To his surprise, she moved forward and gave him a quick hug. She then turned and ran to her shuttle without looking back. Eagleton watched it taxi to the launch/recovery section. When the pressure doors had sealed off that section, he stepped over to the nearest intercom station.
“Vehicle Bay to Commander Ripley.”
Ripley recognized Eagleton’s voice. “Go ahead, Lieutenant.”
“Ashiana has told me that she’s given us all, I repeat, ALL of her people’s technology, not just some military tech, and she did it against orders. We just have to figure out how to use the equipment it’s stored on. I’ll be returning to my post as soon as I make sure the equipment and data is secure, sir.”
Ripley didn’t reply right away, and Eagleton waited. When he finally did speak, his voice sounded a bit sad. “Understood. Carry on, Lieutenant.”
Ripley realized he’d become lost in thought when he heard the Helm Officer say. “Odina shuttle has been launched, sir.”
“Let’s get to Point Hope, Helm.” He’d changed his mind about leaving the system altogether before the Tyrell fleet arrived. Point Hope was far enough away that Pathfinder was unlikely to be detected by the Tyrell, but it would still be able to detect their fleet and therefore monitor the battle. Ripley knew that the Odina were going to repeat their tactic of hyper-jumping close to the enemy ships to be able to bring all the super-ships under fire as quickly as possible. He wondered if the Tyrell had a new tactic. As he watched the shuttle pull away on the tactical display, he whispered, “Good luck, Ashiana.”
The Tyrell fleet arrived right on time, and Ripley quickly saw that they were going to employ a new tactic.
Torq stood near the Command Chair and tried to control his breathing. The Grand Fleet had just emerged into normal space, and the subordinate Fleet Masters were maneuvering their six-ship fleets as ordered. Torq felt relief that the Grand Fleet Master has accepted his advice to spread out the subordinate fleets so that the enemy couldn’t concentrate their fire as easily. That was one part of the battle plan. Accelerating to maximum velocity and trying to ram the nearest enemy ship was the other. He listened to the rising level of voices as the Control Center crew yielded to their battle lust. Even the Grand Fleet Master was surrendering to the ecstatic frenzy. Torq felt the urge to let go of his control but resisted. If the battle went badly, someone had to keep their head about them. He saw one of the enemy vessels drop out of hyper-space relatively close and ahead of the flagship. The Grand Fleet Master screamed at the Helm Master to ram that enemy ship. Torq held his breath as the flagship accelerated quickly.
Ripley heard someone yell out, “Son-of-a-bitch! That super-ship just—“
Ripley finished his sentence for him. “Rammed one of the Odina ships, yes!”
“There goes anther one,” said the A.O.
Ripley was stunned. Sure those super-ships were huge and well-armored, but still…deliberately ramming another ship at a significant fraction of light speed was mind-boggling. How many times could a ship do that without suffering major damage itself? As he asked himself that question, he noticed that the Tyrell fleet was splitting up into smaller groups. At first he didn’t understand why they were doing that, but when he saw how the Odina ships were responding, it all became clear. The ramming would teach the Odina ship commanders to keep their distance, and spreading out the attack fleet meant that the Odina ships would only be able to target the nearest enemy group effectively. Firing their anti-tachyon beams at long range reduced the damage those beams would inflict when they hit, and because the Tyrell ships were moving fast, hitting them was now less likely too. The Tyrell were learning combat tactics fast, and that scared Ripley.
Tyrell ship icons were started to break up, but so were some of the Odina ship icons. In fact, they were disappearing at a much faster rate, and it wasn’t all from ramming. Longer ranges didn’t seem to make the Tyrell FTL kinetic energy projectiles any less effective.
Trog found it very difficult to stay in control. As he looked around him, he could see that some of the crew were already throwing up, their bodies reacting as if the battle was over. Except that it wasn’t! This battle was taking a lot longer than normal, and the crew weren’t used to that.
“TORQ!” He turned to look at the source of that anguished shout. It was the Grand Fleet Master himself. Through clenched teeth, he said, “Take control of weapons!” Torq looked over at the Weapons station and saw that the Weapons Master was doubled over and heaving. Torq jumped over, pushed the W.O. aside and began manipulating the console. The battle wasn’t over yet, and there were still enemy ships maneuvering to prepare to hyper-jump closer. He had to target them before they could do that. His hands became a blur as they told the attack computers what to do, and his mind was now calm enough to notice how much faster the flagship was firing than would normally be the case. We have to learn to resist the battle lust! It was a radical thought that would not go over well with the rest of the officer corps, but he had to find a way to convince them.
Ripley looked at the display sidebar chart that showed the rate at which both sides were losing ships. The Odina were losing ships faster in the beginning, and then there seemed to be a marked drop in the effectiveness of the Tyrell FTL fire. But now that was reversing again, and Odina losses were climbing. He recognized the tipping point when Odina combat effectiveness suddenly plummeted as enemy FTL fire began to overwhelm the remaining defenders.
When the last Odina ship was destroyed, Ripley looked around the dead quiet Bridge and said, “Take us home, Helm.”
Chapter Seven:
Six months later.
No sooner had Eagleton arrived home from the latest Alpha recon mission then he noticed there was a recorded message waiting for him. It was from Cate.
“Welcome back, Gort. You’re just in time to join the brainstorming group that I’m part of. We’re one of four groups that are looking at Odina military technology and coming up with ideas for how best to exploit and use it. I kept telling our group leader how good your tactical instincts are, and he finally got permission to second you to our group if you agree. It’s strictly voluntary, and it’ll keep you on the ground for a while. I know you want to rack up mission time because you believe it’ll speed up your next promotion, but trust me on this, Gort. We’re coming up with ideas for whole new weapon systems, and if they get built, the people who came up with them will be first in line to command them. Drop your gear and get over here now, Gort!”
Eagleton hurried over to the aerospace force complex where Cate’s group was operating. Someone must have told Cate that he was in the building because she met him at the entrance to the section where the groups were working.
“You obviously got my message,” she said with a smile.
“Yeah, although I’m not really sure why you think I’d be of help to the group. What do I know of advanced weapon systems?”
She nodded. “Right now, nothing, but that can change quickly. That learning machine you helped Ashiana move is a marvelous device. We figured out how to access it and convert all of the Odina language into human English. There are now hundreds of technicians, engineers and scientists who are accessing that data. My God, Gort, the stuff that’s in that data is amazing. It’s not just basic science; it’s also complete technical specs and schematics on entire systems ranging from sensing and jamming equipment to anti-tachyon projectors of various sizes and power levels to spacecraft designs. That’s the kind of data that our think tanks, like the one I’
m in, can look at to figure out what kind of military force we should build. Do we build big ships that have huge particle cannon or lots of small ships? That’s where someone with a good grasp of tactics can make a contribution.”
“Okay, but why me? You’re pretty good at tactics, and you’re very good at strategy.” He was about to say more but she jumped in first.
“My strength is strategy, but we both know you’re better at tactics than I am, our chess matches notwithstanding. I tend to win when my overall strategy overpowers your short term tactics, and you win when it’s the other way around. Let me give you one example of where your instincts can prove useful. We know that the Tyrell use the same detection system that’s based on mass and distance that the Odina use. The more massive the enemy ship is, the further away it can be detected. That means that the less massive a ship is, the closer it can get before being detected. What we’re struggling with, and haven’t yet been able to solve, is how to build a ship armed with an anti-tachyon weapon small enough to be able to get within effective weapon’s range without being detected.”
“Ha, that would be a neat trick if your group could pull it off,” said Eagleton. He looked off into infinity as he pondered that problem. Harrow waited. “You’ve tried every combination of weapon size and ship design in the Odina database?” he asked. Harrow nodded. “Then we have to come up with a new design that’s not in the database.”
Harrow laughed. “We’ve already tried that. The design techies who are now familiar with Odina spacecraft systems have generated half a dozen designs that are smaller than anything the Odina designed, but they’re still too massive. The particle weapon just doesn’t have the effective range to reach the target before the ship would be detected. If we upgrade the weapon power level and effective range, we also increase the ship’s mass and detection range increases correspondingly.”
Eagleton shrugged. “Well, I’m not getting any inspirational ideas right off the top of my head, but it is an interesting challenge. Okay, I’ll volunteer for the group. Now what?”
“I’ll let the group leader know, and he’ll finalize the administrative details,” said Harrow as she smiled. “The group will be breaking off for the day pretty soon, so why not go home now, unpack, get some rest and be back here bright and early, okay?”
Eagleton laughed. “Okay, Cate. Tomorrow bright and early it is.”
“Good! I’ll have a lot of material for you to look at and learn by then. In the meantime, if you get any eureka moments, record them somewhere for God’s sake!”
The days that followed became a blur. After a brief meeting to get to know the rest of Cate’s group, Eagleton spent most of his time studying technical evaluations of Odina weapon and spacecraft systems. Meanwhile, Cate’s group, known as the Blue Team, were attempting to come up with a configuration for a weapon platform that was not a complete spacecraft, but was small enough to get within effective weapon range without being detected. By the time Eagleton was up to speed and joined the group, they had exhausted all of the design options for a small, parasite craft that would operate from a larger ‘mothership’. He reviewed their analysis and couldn’t find anything wrong with it. That evening, when he was back in his temporary quarters, he called up the working papers on the parasite craft designs and tried looking at them from a Tactical Officer’s point of view rather an engineer’s.
The last Odina battle showed that the Tyrell were willing to experiment with tactics involving speeds at a significant fraction of the speed of light. The Odina had learned the folly of conducting micro-jumps through hyper-space to get very close to the Tyrell super-ships. Even if the Tyrell ships didn’t try to ram the closest enemy ship, they could still jump away themselves if they wanted to avoid combat. Somehow, there had to be a way to fire anti-tachyon beams at them without them knowing they were under attack until it was too late to do anything about it. He decided to review the specification of the anti-tachyon particle accelerator cannon. Tachyons were particles that never travelled slower than the speed of light, and they hadn’t been proven to exist at all until the late 21st century. It was soon learned, to every physicist’s surprise, that tachyons did obey a speed limit. There was a narrow band within which tachyons could exist that was not slower than 5.5 times light speed and not faster than 8.9 times light speed. That the ratio of the latter to the former was exactly 1.618, which was the approximate value of Phi also known as the Golden Ratio, generated no end of speculation as to whether this proved that the physical laws of the universe had indeed been designed by a Supreme Consciousness.
Eagleton did not concern himself with that spiritual question. He was interested in how that speed limit bandwidth affected tactical considerations. Suppose a Tyrell super-ship was travelling at point six of light. If a human ship were chasing the super-ship from behind, and it fired its particle weapon, the net speed of the anti-tachyons would be their own speed minus the speed of the target. That meant that the particle beam would take just a little bit longer to reach the target and therefore the actual range, before the beam started to spread out, would be reduced. That was not good.
If, on the other hand, the human ship was in front of the super-ship, then the net speed of the beam would be the particle speed plus the super-ship’s speed. The super-ship would be travelling into the beam and actually increase the weapon’s effective range. But getting directly in front of a ship that was travelling that fast was difficult to do. Long range detection might show a target ship heading straight for the human ship and still end up passing it by hundreds of kilometers because the detection system wasn’t designed to pinpoint a target’s location accurately from far away. And if the human ship somehow managed to get exactly in front of the oncoming super-ship, it risked being hit by it. No, attacking from in front was just too technically demanding to work. Attacking from the side was even more difficult, and unless the super-ship just happened to be passing by a human warship at very close range, trying to hit it with a particle beam was like trying to hit a bullet travelling from one side to the other with another bullet. Impossible was the word that popped into his head. He realized that the excitement at the prospect of using anti-tachyon beam weapons was misplaced. They sounded good on paper, but actually using them in space was difficult. That the Odina managed to inflict as many losses on the Tyrell as they did was a testament to their perseverance. That and the fact that when you have a lot of ships firing particle beams, chances are some of them will hit the target due to sheer luck. And it certainly didn’t hurt that the Tyrell had made the mistake in the first two battles of keeping their ships relatively stationary.
Eagleton decided to step back and look at the tactical problem from a new perspective. If a Tyrell warship was detected maneuvering around a star system at a high fraction of light, but not travelling on a continuously straight vector, then getting anywhere near it meant that the human ship needed to have hyper-jump capability. So the first step would be to micro-jump behind the target, the second step would then be to get directly behind it as precisely as possible, step three would be to micro-jump to within attack range while matching velocities, and then step four would be to fire the particle weapon. Four easy steps, except that staying outside of the enemy’s own detection range meant that the anti-tachyon particles would be spread out so wide by the time they hit the target that the hull might not suffer any significant penetration. Continuous firing would eventually cause anti-tachyons to penetrate into the guts of the enemy ship, but that assumed the enemy ship did not respond to the attack by changing course. It didn’t matter how many times he went through the four steps, he couldn’t find a way to hit the super-ship with a narrow penetrating particle beam from beyond detection range.
That night he dreamed about being in space combat over and over again. When he suddenly woke up, he heard the echo of a thought in his head. Less is more. What could that possibly mean in the context of the objective he was trying to achieve? The answer came to him when he was in the showe
r. The idea was so counter-intuitive that he hurried to finish the shower and get to his computer as fast as possible. He called up the engineering specs on particle beam weapon systems and confirmed his hunch. A quick check of the tonnage numbers verified his theory. It would work! He had the solution.
Harrow noticed his relaxed demeanor when Eagleton entered the conference room that the team was using. She came over to him so that the two of them could speak privately. “You look very satisfied with yourself, Gort. Either you got laid last night or…” she let the sentence dangle. Eagleton grinned.
“I think I’ve solved it,” he said in a low, conspiratorial voice.
“It’s a matter of tactics, right?” she asked.
“Ah…sort of. Let’s the get the group settled, and I’ll show everyone what I’ve got.”
When everyone was seated and prepared to get down to work, the Team Leader turned to Eagleton and said, “Cate tells me you have something to show us, Gort. I’m anxious to hear it.”